time was a time of great expansion of the activities
of the church in all directions. The influx of immigration, temporarily
checked by the hard times of 1857 and by the five years of war, came in
again in such floods as never before.[357:1] The foreign immigration is
always attended by a westward movement of the already settled
population. The field of home missions became greater and more exacting
than ever. The zeal of the church, educated during the war to higher
ideas of self-sacrifice, rose to the occasion. The average yearly
receipts of the various Protestant home missionary societies, which in
the decade 1850-59 had been $808,000, rose in the next decade to more
than $2,000,000, in the next to nearly $3,000,000, and for the seven
years 1881-87 to $4,000,000.[358:1]

In the perils of abounding wealth by which the church after the war was
beset, it was divine fatherly kindness that opened before it new and
enlarged facilities of service to the kingdom of heaven among foreign
nations. From the first feeble beginnings of foreign missions from
America in India and in the Sandwich Islands, they had been attended by
the manifest favor of God. When the convulsion of the Civil War came on,
with prostrations of business houses, and enormous burdens of public
obligation, and private beneficence drawn down, as it seemed, to its
"bottom dollar" for new calls of patriotism and charity, and especially
when the dollar in a man's pocket shrank to a half or a third of its
value in the world's currency, it seemed as if the work of foreign
missions would have to be turned over to Christians in lands less
burdened with accumulated disadvantages. But here again the grandeur of
the burden gave an inspiration of strength to the burden-bearer. From
1840 to 1849 the average yearly receipts of the various foreign
missionary societies of the Protestant churches of the country had been
a little more than a half-million. In the decade 1850-59 they had risen
to $850,000; for the years of distress, 1860-69, they exceeded
$1,300,000; for the eleven years 1870-80 the annual receipts in this
behalf were $2,200,000; and in the seven years 1881-87 they were
$3,000,000.[359:1]

We have seen how, only forty years before the return of peace, in the
days of a humble equality in moderate estates, ardent souls exulted
together in the inauguration of the era of democracy in beneficence,
when every humblest giver might, through association and organizati